Last week, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, which aims to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency instances for high performance computing.

The announcement was met with a variety of responses from the blogosphere and media. Based on the claim that Amazon had benchmarked its new cluster service at spot 146 on the top500.org list, Bill St. Arnaud asked his readers, “Should funding agencies ban purchase of HPC clusters by university researchers?” The Register’s Dave Rosenberg, meanwhile, pronounced, “Amazon sounds death knell for rocket-science grids.”

As always, we’d caution readers to reserve judgment until independent investigations can confirm advertised performance and cost. But today Craig Lee, President and CEO of the Open Grid Forum, responds with his own take on reports of grid’s death.

In Indonesia, weather forecasts powered by grid computing are being distributed twice a day using Google Maps, along with Imsakiyah, the calendar of Muslim prayer times as well as an earthquake update.

It is possible to find many explanations of hardware virtualization on the Internet and, of course, in computer science courses. Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of confusion regarding this increasingly popular technology.